Correlation between Superiority and Intervention effects

effects

The reader may wonder why the Superiority-obeying questions such as the German wh-question in (51a) or the English D-linked question in (59a) are assumed to contain only one Q-particle. As we saw, Superiority-satisfying questions can be also derived from structures containing multiple QPs, as in (52).

Regarding this issue, Cable (2007, 2010) discusses an interesting piece of evidence, namely a well-attested crosslinguistic correlation between Superiority and Intervention effects (see also Beck 1996, 2006; Pesetsky 2000; Kotek 2014a,b). This correlation suggests that in certain languages Superiority-satisfying orders can arise either as a result of a derivation with multiple QPs or as a result of a derivation with a single QP dominating the highest wh-word.

The empirical description of Intervention effects is the following. The well- formed German multiple wh-question (60a) becomes unacceptable when the wh- in-situ appears below negation, as in (60b):

(60) a. Wer1 hat Hans wo2 angetroffen? (German)

who has Hans where met

‘Who met Hans where?’ b. ?? _Wer

1 hat niemanden wo2 angetroffen?

who has nobody where met

‘Who met nobody where?’ [from Cable 2010:122]

On the other hand, in English standard, non-D-linked multiple wh-questions do not exhibit sensitivity to Intervention effects. As shown in (61a), the in-situ

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Pesetsky (1987), the English D-linked wh-questions do show sensitivity to Intervention effects with Superiority-violating orders, as illustrated in (61b):

(61) a. Who1 didn’t read what2? (English)

b. * Which book2 didn’t which person1 read? [from Pesetsky 2000:60]

Cable relates this puzzle to the number or Q-particles and generalizes the attested differences as follows:

(62) Correlation between Superiority and Intervention effects

In any language L, the wh-in-situ in a multiple question of L is subject to Intervention Effects iff L is not subject to Superiority effects.

[from Cable 2010:132] Following Beck (2006), Cable assumes that in multiple wh-questions Intervention effects arise when an intervener (i.e., a focus-sensitive operator such as negation) is placed between the in-situ wh-word and the interrogative head. Recall from the discussion in chapter 2 that, within Q-theory, the wh-words do not have quantificational force by themselves. In order to be interpreted by LF, they must appear within domain of a certain operator that regulates their semantics. In questions, they are c-commanded by a Q-particle which assigns them the interrogative value and then, through the help of Q, the wh-words can establish the semantic relation with C. Intervention effects appear if the wh-word is c-commanded by some focus-sensitive operator other than Q. For instance, negation behaves as an offending operator. The configuration resulting in an Intervention effect is represented below:

(63) Configuration resulting in an Intervention effect [CP C [... Q [... offending operator [... [wh-word] ...] ] ]

no Q-particle

[adopted from Cable 2010:127] As shown in (63), the offending operator prevents the wh-in-situ from being bound by the interrogative C and getting semantic interpretation. In other words, the relation between C and the wh-in-situ is short-circuited by the semantic content of the intervener. As a consequence, the semantic derivation crashes and ungrammaticality arises.

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Recall that Q-theory allows a multiple wh-question to contain fewer Q-particles than wh-words. Under Cable’s (2007, 2010) proposal, the degraded status of the German multiple wh-question in (60b) is captured as in (64):

(64) Intervention effect in German

?? _[

CP [QP Q wer]1 hat niemanden [ t1 [XP wo2] angetroffen] ]

Intervention effect configuration

[adopted from Cable 2010:131] In (64), the wh-in-situ wo ‘where’ has not been merged with a Q-particle, so it is vulnerable to the Intervention effect caused by negation, which is located between

the wh-in-situ and C.15 _{In contrast, the English non-D-linked question in (61a)}

does not show Intervention effects, because there is one Q-particle for each

wh-word. Moreover, since every QP undergoes movement to the left periphery

(although, the lower QP later is pronounced in its base position), in the syntactic and LF structures both QPs end up higher than negation. Consequently, the Intervention effects are absent. The correspondent derivation of the English question in (61a) is represented below:

(65) [CP [QP Q who1] [QP Q what2] [didn’t bought ... t1 ... t2 ...]] (English)

The diagram in (66) summarizes the main points of Cable’s Q-theory regarding

the established correlation between Superiority and Intervention effects in multiple wh-questions:

(66) a. Multiple QPs: Superiority effects, no Intervention effects (English)

[CP [Spec,CP [QP Q wh1] [QP Q wh2]] C [... offending operator ...t1 ...t2 ...]]

b. Single QP: Intervention effects, no Superiority effects (German)

* [CP [Spec,CP [QP Q wh2]] C [... offending operator ...[XP wh1] ...t2 ...]]

no Q-particle

Let me conclude the two previous subsections by summarizing the main points of Q-theory with respect to Superiority. The interaction between Superiority and Intervention effects relies crucially on the number of Q-particles merged into the tree. Superiority effects arise in multiple wh-questions, in which every wh-item is dominated by a QP. In this case, all QPs undergo multiple internal Merge to the

15 _{According to Cable, the same structure underlies the English D-linked Superiority-violating}

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left periphery of the sentence, obeying the initial c-command relation (in other words, they ‘tuck in’). Languages resorting to this pattern of movement typically exhibit Superiority effects, but fail to show Intervention effects. In contrast, if a multiple wh-question contains only one QP ―which can dominate either the highest of the lower wh-constituent―, such question will not show sensitivity to Superiority violations, but will exhibit sensitivity to Intervention effects.

However, it is worth noting that Cable’s formulation of the Q-theory has been designed to capture the data from English and German, languages, in which only one wh-phrase is pronounced at the leftmost position in a clause. What about MWF languages, then? Can Q-theory account for the MWF phenomenon and the differences between Russian and Bulgarian? These questions are addressed in the follows of this section.